Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are no doubt aware that Apple plans to reveal their “latest creation” tomorrow, January 27th, 2009. It is most likely their long awaited iTablet/iSlate/iWhatever. I’ll be following Engadget’s live blog of the event tomorrow.
It is also my birthday tomorrow, but I don’t care as much about that. I just want to know what Apple’s been doing all this time and what they’re going to announce. I’m pretty sure that makes me nerdy, among other qualifications.
These are my tablet related predictions, which I will update with the results:
- Apple will announce a tablet device of some kind.
- It’s name will begin with a lower case I. I have to get at least one correct, right? I’ll guess iTablet. I don’t think they’ll do iSlate.
- The device will not have an e-ink screen.
- The device will not have an AMOLED screen.
- It will be a conventional LCD screen with LED backlighting.
- It will not run full OS X. Only a subset will be allowed, such as Safari, etc. Only apps from an app store will be allowed.
- There will be a tablet app store.
- There will be backwards compatibility for iPhone apps running in some kind of emulation mode.
- There will be a innovative text input method. I can’t speculate as to what it will be, but knowing Apple, it will be good.
- Its battery life will be expressed in hours, not days or weeks, unlike the Kindle or Nook.
- Verizon will be announced as a 3G data partner for the tablet device.
- The tablet will sell like hotcakes at first because Apple made it, but I think this will be a fad device and perhaps regarded as Apple’s second flop (see Newton). I am putting this down “on paper” because I think it will be funny if I’m completely wrong and I can read my own words in a year or so.
My other predictions for the event are as follows, which I will also update with results:
- No new iPhone will be announced.
- No AT&T exclusivity related announcements will be made (this will be saved until WWDC in June).
- Incremental changes will be made for the iPhone OS, perhaps allowing some sort of rudimentary multitasking, perhaps in a 3.5 or 4.0 revision of the OS.
Additionally, I am aware that I haven’t blogged in 5 months. I’ll be following up on this post with some sort of recap explaining what I’ve been doing.
Are you going to do a blow-by-blow on your recommendations for tomorrow? This is the most sane review and guess I have seen online
not to mean any bias or anything, but according to your blog’s tags you are not a Mac user. Do you have an iPhone?
Just asking to point out if your opinions (which do certainly count anyway), come from a Mac-guy or a PC-guy or someone who personally believes in at least one Apple product so much as to own one.
Thanks for asking Maclord.
I’m a PC guy mainly, as a C# developer and general nerd, but I do have OS X running on my Dell Mini 9 for iPhone development. I own an iPhone 3G and jealously look at people with 3GS. I’m anxiously awaiting the Verizon iPhone so I can switch and hopefully have an LTE/CDMA iPhone!
I’m excited to see what Apple has and see if they prove me wrong again. I never thought the original iPhone would have caught on. It had no GPS, no 3G data, no 3rd party apps that weren’t web pages, etc. But clearly, many disagreed with me.
The iPhone 3G is great though (although mine is jailbroken).
Nick,
I’ll update the post during the live blog as my predictions are confirmed or overturned.
Glad to see you blogging again! As Nick said, a pretty sane set of predictions. I think I agree on just about everything, but I don’t think they’re going to leave AT&T totally out in the cold on this one… *yet*. I’ve been considering getting an e-reader of some kind, but wanted to wait until Apple finally showed us what they have before making a decision.